Abstract
This paper presents an artistic investigation into contemporary immersive exhibitions, focusing on the distinction between commercial spectacle and introspective experience. In the context of mass- produced, market-driven immersive environments, audiences are often reduced to passive visual consumers, where com modified aesthetics and per formative social media interaction dominate the experiential structure. As a counterpoint, this study introduces Limit Situation, an Extended Reality (XR) art project that constructs six symbolically paradoxical digital environments inspired by the existential philosophy of Karl Jaspers. The work fosters a meditative experience that engages with both external alienation and internal loss. Unlike sensory overload-based installations, this project emphasizes minimalism and emotional guidance, encouraging self-reflection rather than distraction. Through comparative analysis, this paper proposes “existential introspection” as an alternative model to spectacle-driven immersion, reclaiming immersive experience from its com modified forms.
Keywords
Immersive Experience; Reflective Immersion; XR Art; Experience Economy
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.259
Citation
Lin, Z.(2025) Reimagining Immersive Experience: From Visual Spectacle to Existential Introspection, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.259
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 3 - Design, Art & Technology
Reimagining Immersive Experience: From Visual Spectacle to Existential Introspection
This paper presents an artistic investigation into contemporary immersive exhibitions, focusing on the distinction between commercial spectacle and introspective experience. In the context of mass- produced, market-driven immersive environments, audiences are often reduced to passive visual consumers, where com modified aesthetics and per formative social media interaction dominate the experiential structure. As a counterpoint, this study introduces Limit Situation, an Extended Reality (XR) art project that constructs six symbolically paradoxical digital environments inspired by the existential philosophy of Karl Jaspers. The work fosters a meditative experience that engages with both external alienation and internal loss. Unlike sensory overload-based installations, this project emphasizes minimalism and emotional guidance, encouraging self-reflection rather than distraction. Through comparative analysis, this paper proposes “existential introspection” as an alternative model to spectacle-driven immersion, reclaiming immersive experience from its com modified forms.